Chad Valley is a British toy company, founded in 1897, by the two sons of Anthony Johnson, a printing magnate. It is named after the valley in the River Chad, Harborne where it first set-up shop, in a large red brick factory. The site is now a refurbished office suite, with the factory being renovated and leased as a “thriving, productive working environment,” at least according to the land owners. But Chad Valley still exists, and it used to be important. For a time in 1938 they were the official toymakers for then Princess Elizabeth. The first batch they made were felt dolls, 46cm short, wearing a floral dress, and a burnt orange velvet jacket and shoes.
You can’t buy the doll from Chad Valley anymore — Princess Elizabeth II is now Queen, with an delicate public image. But, if you’re so inclined, doll websites the world over are selling them. In fact the few that have survived get more valuable with age; the cheapest I’ve found is in the low $1000s. And yet, the doll is meaningless, and maybe even worthless to most. Owning it won’t help you live longer, or get that promotion you’ve desperately been wanting. You probably won’t even use it for what it was intended for: play. Nonetheless, people are buying them, and storing them, and polishing them, and caring for them by the dozens if not hundreds. Because for most of us it is a felt doll. For others it is a childhood, woven into the seams.
Lila Rait counts herself as one of the few who care, as she sits in a small room in the rehabilitation centre in Brighton. She was getting off a bus and, before she was firmly footed, the driver drove off and forced Lila to the concrete. On her side table was a tissue box, a phone address book, a stack of French doll magazines, and a teddy bear that her daughter bought, she assumes, from a local Op shop. Honey yellow hair. Rich blue veins. A leopard top that screams soap opera mom. She sits up and smiles, I have about a thousand dolls.
Perth, nestled on the edge of Western Australia and the Indian Ocean, is the most isolated city in the world. But 293 kilometres north from Perth is the town of Mukinbudin. Population: 281. If you got all the townspeople and spread them out in a line, one kilometre apart from each other, you couldn’t make the distance between Perth and Mukinbudin. The town was settled by pastoralists in the 1880s, a meager stop over for miners wanting to rest up before the headed off to the goldfields. Only three people from the town are deemed important enough to get a Wikipedia entry written about them, all former AFL players. Lila was born in Mukinbudin in 1929.
Unnecessarily isolated is how Lila describes her childhood. Her mother was a primary school teacher, but ironically a believer in homeschooling. She had few, if any, real friends — a byproduct of being separated from school. Both she and her brother were raised on their family’s sheep farm, which doubled as their home growing up. The farm laid across 2000 acres, with enough space for a family tennis court. For a time, the court was home to dozens of chickens. The family of four lived in a hill top farm house. The centrepiece of the living room was a stone fireplace, which was later found to have quartz encrusted with gold. There were pepper corn trees, and grapevines; all part of the mother’s vegetable garden. The open spaces of the sheep farm allowed Lila to be around an eclectic batch of animals — most adorable of all, Lila had pet echidnas, if only for a short time. We put them into the foul pen one night, the mesh going all the way down, a few feet or so. But by the next morning, they’d burrowed down and out of the pen, never to be seen again.
Every so often her aunt in Perth, also a teacher, would send dolls. The first was a cotton flour sack doll: at the end of the 19th century in Australia, fabric was considered too precious to waste on toy-things for children. And so women made the most of the cotton sacks they’d get with every batch of flour. Aprons, clothing and, yes, dolls — on the front of these sack was an outline for a simple female ragdoll. And when Lila was four, the family had an English boy working on the farm. As an act of kindness, he asked his mother to send over a doll for young Lila, the Chad Valley Princess Elizabeth Doll. It was always my favourite. It was gorgeous.
For much of their history dolls, well, weren’t meant to be played with. Early wax dolls were made from beeswax that easily melted; porcelain shattered without trying too hard. Dolls were made to be protected, and can punish those that don’t. Lila used to be a journalism lecturer at a Tafe and a student, having known about her doll collection, came up at the end of the class. The student’s brother was upset with her, and decided to get revenge by torturing the poor girl’s doll. It was a celluloid doll. Celluloid, the same material that early film was made from, is extremely flammable, unbeknownst to her brother. The brother took the doll from her room into his and only a few minutes later their house was burnt down. In other words, don’t mess with dolls.
Prior to the 1850s, dolls were proportioned and dress like adults, not children. Children would be shown how to behave like their adult dolls, or in the case of Lila’s doll, love the Queen. In other cases, dolls were meant to preserve. In the Victorian Era in England, wealthy parents would procure wax effigies of their dead children: a wax doll copy of the infant, dressed in their clothes and hair. These dolls were placed in an open casket at the funeral, and would be left at the grave site. Sometimes, however, the wax effigy would be brought home, placed in a crib, and treated like a real baby.
When the Second World War made its way to Australia, Lila was sent to an all-girls boarding school in Perth, being able to see the waterfront from her classroom. It took the most global conflict in world history to shake Lila out of her isolation. When she first arrived, she struggled to make friends, didn’t know how to talk to them, was awkward. She felt homesick almost as soon as she got there. And yet she brought with her one doll, her Princess Elizabeth. When she returned home and struggled to find a job, she left for Melbourne. But this time, Lila left her doll collection to her niece, including her Princess Elizabeth.
She wound up in as an assistant in a Navy office, before joining the Airforce, and then pursuing a career in journalism in London. Lila returned to Melbourne, bought a house, and had a family. When her daughter grew up, she had a yearning for her mother’s dolls. Like many though, Lila couldn’t give her those early childhood memorabilia. The Princess Elizabeth doll, as with the rest, had been torn to shreds many years before by her niece. A part of Lila’s life, her estate, that she couldn’t pass onto her children. And so she started again, because I wanted to replace what I lost.
The world before eBay was a little different, meaning she would advertise on the local trading post for a missing vintage early Australian wooden doll, or an 1850s German paper mache doll. Within days, people would call and explain how they had this doll from their grandmother, how they’ve been meaning to value the doll but never got around to it. And they’d sell it to her, without even a moment to think about the memories woven into the doll. Other times, she’d acquire the dolls under more obtuse circumstances.
A friend of Lila that she’d known for a good number of years needed to get rid of a vast estate. Instead of say, selling their ornaments and knick-knacks, the friend decided to have a bonfire. As you do. Much of the estate was simmering away when the friend held onto a doll. This was not hers, and presumable she’d never seen it before, but she couldn’t throw it in. She fell in love with the eyes, Lila explained. She called up Lila and, when Lila realised the rarity of the doll, she quickly acquired it for her collection. It’s rare to see a doll in good condition from those days. Flooding, droughts, scathing heat and, in many cases, bushfires; it shouldn’t come as a shock when I saw no few dolls from early Australian made it out. When you consider that the materials used were less than pristine, it paints a picture of an unforgiving landscape, where everything returns from whence it came.
In the late 80s, Lila joined the Doll Association of Victoria, a community of like-minded doll lovers. It was a form of masochism, joining the group, wanting to find others that shared her passion. The group, 25 members strong, meets once a month in a hall next to a Anglo-Saxon style church. The hall is small and white, seemingly used for after school activities. There is a wooden cupboard, filled with donated books and volleyball trophies. On the front of the cupboard is a quote from Matthew 5:6, in sticker form: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
The day I visited was “craft day”: a day to share tips, talk about the goings-on in their lives, and fix up some decaying dolls. A front desk greets you as you walk in, stacked with flyers for upcoming auctions. It’s where I’ve gotten most of my dolls, the lady manning the front desk tells me. I told my kids, ‘when I die don’t sell them, put them up for auction’. You can spread the them around, give other people a chance. I’m only a caretaker.
Lila is there early, walking around with the help of a frame and cane. She dotes around until two women walk in, wanting to sell some old dolls. Everyone gathers around, Lila at the front examining the selection, not unlike surgeons on the operating table. A few minutes later, and it seemed the enthusiasm had dissipated. There worried the dolls have diseases, the woman at the front table tells me. There are risks with older wax dolls of bacteria being carried in the mold itself.
An hour in and all of the women gathered around a cluttered table in the centre, coffee mugs lining up with every seat. There is no judgment or confused looks, no need to ever grasp for an explanation. Everyone understands why they’re doing this. Lila, however, sat amongst others, but seemed distracted, having only fleeting conversations. It seems that the girl from Mukinbudin is still there.
The thousand-strong doll collection now litters her Brighton home, the same one she moved into when she arrived in Melbourne. I practically have to move out, Lila laughs, comparing the current state of affairs to a museum. And like all museums, you have to pay constant attention to all the items on display. Dolls you sort of have to watch. You have to watch for the string, you have watch for insects. But as she acquired her collection, her interest moved into the historical or, as Lila would say, it became an academic pursuit. She would never admit to caring about the dolls, a museum curator would never get pleasure from their collection.
At first this seemed to be an excuse, a justification for ironic enjoyment. And yet, right at the back of the Redmond Barry Reading Room, on a flimsy metal shelf, is her first and only book. ‘Through the Nursery Window’, published in 1989, offers an exhaustive history of Australian dolls from its founding right up until the mid 20th century. Every page is filled with tiny details: a newly unearthed doll here, an anecdote there, capturing a grim situation for old dolls as they decay with time.
But this degradation is true of many of things that still exist: monuments and ancient buildings, books and antiques. Cars from the early 50s had to endure many of the same conditions of heat and rust, and yet they’re still on the road, albeit barely. So why not dolls? Why is it that so few items from those early years survived? I may have already answered the question: because they were from our childhoods. In her book, Lila writes about the national, monumental carelessness:
We have simply never cared enough about the things of childhood to see them as being worthy of preservation. We have preserved the relics of war, and of some men’s achievements, but childhood — the one experience common to all adults — has not been seen as worth commemorating.
Not Lila though. Right in her house sits a Princess Elizabeth Doll, replacing a piece of her childhood.
Bibliography
Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History of Society(2008) ‘Grief, Death, Funerals’ [Online] Available at: http://www.faqs.org/childhood/Gr-Im/Grief-Death-Funerals.html
Rait, Lila (1989) ‘Through the Nursery Window: A History of Antique and Collectable Dolls in Australia from 1788–1950’, Oxford University Press, Melbourne
Smithsonian Magazine (2015) ‘The History of Creepy Dolls’, [Online] Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-creepy-dolls-180955916/
Toy Price Guide (2013) ‘The History of Chad Valley’, [Online] Available at: http://www.toypriceguide.co.uk/the-history-of-chad-valley/
Victorian Traditions (2016) ‘Wax Dolls, Montanari and Pierotti Dolls — Gotta Love the Beauty of Wax’ [Online] Available at: https://victoriantraditions.blogspot.com.au/2016/04/wax-dolls-montanari-and-pierotti-dolls.html
Woolworths Museum (2017) ‘Toys for Toffs: The Early History of Chad Valley’, [Online] Available at: http://www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk/Toys-EarlyCV.html
